Paper #3 - [DIS 2014] Encouraging Ambiguous Experience: Guides for Personal Meaning Making

This paper looks at the idea of creating pieces or works that are intentionally ambiguous, that allow the user/viewer/reader to create their own meaning through interacting with the work. The main way it does this is by looking at project undertaken by the author, wherein a class was tasked with engaging with Gertrude Stein's collection of prose poems Tender Buttons (1914) through the mediating mechanism of a notebook filled with prompt-style questions and gridded space for drawings. The paper explores whether this mediation of the students' engagement with the text was helpful or intrusive - it is notable that the response from the class is mixed, as some found it helpful at guiding them through, some found that it blocked or waylaid their personal experience of the work, and others found the mediating notebook to be more of an engagement than the work itself [1].

I found this paper particularly intriguing because it engages with something I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is the fact that often a large part of the enjoyment I get from a work, be it a book, a film, a piece of art or even an installation or interactive piece, is in the exploration and personal interpretation of it, the fact that I have to grapple with it in order to unearth or tease out meaning. More parochial works, works that assume an average reader and prescribe a certain reading approach, what Umberto Eco and others refer to as "closed" works [2], lack something for me. I enjoy reading above my own presumed reading level, so to speak. I enjoy encountering something I do not understand, that I must wrestle understanding from as an active participant.

The Stein quotes used in the paper reminded me of an artist I mentioned in the previous post, Katie Rose Pipkin. Her work in generative art is highly ambiguous by its very nature, and all the more intriguing to me for it. I was particularly reminded of a curatorial chapbook collection of algorithmically-generated poetry she released last year, picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself.  The work is initially alienating - it throws the reader - and yet attempting to wrestle meaning from an essentially meaningless thing is the very intent of the collection. It is consciously asking us whether these machine-written poems are any less compelling or meaningful than those with a real human mind behind them [3].

inflorescence.city, another of her collaborations with Loren Schmidt, also calls to mind a similar feeling, and that aspect of "thrownness" mentioned in the paper at hand, the idea of a work plunging the audience into a seemingly fully-realised world with little explanation, and have that feeling of disorientation be a conscious affect. This is something present in some of my favourite novels by authors like William Gibson and China Miéville, who's books force the reader to learn the language of the world in order to understand the novel, and Umberto Eco, who's collection of semiotic essays The Role of the Reader: Exploration of the Semiotics of Texts (1979) is referenced in the paper itself.

China Miéville has mentioned in interviews his love of pulp surrealism in particular, in which there is "radical alienation," the "aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation," and an attempt to "constantly surprise the reader" [4].

See also this BBC book club interview with Miéville: http://bbc.in/1kQFj8r

The fact that there is similar thinking in more multidisciplinary fields such as those dealt with at conferences such as DIS is important to me, as ambiguous experiences, those that not merely ask for but require the active exploration by and participation of the audience, are for more interesting and vital from my point of view than more "closed," packaged, and mediated work which tends to proscribe broad or conflicting interpretations.

[1] Daniel Carter. 2014. Encouraging ambiguous experience: guides for personal meaning making. In Proceedings of the 2014 companion publication on Designing interactive systems (DIS Companion '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-64. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598784.2602782

[2] Eco, U. The Role of the Reader: Exploration of the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1979.

[3] Pipkin, K. R. picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself. Self-published, 2015. Available online at https://katierose.itch.io/picking-figs

[4] Marshall, R. The Road to Perdido: An Interview with China Miéville. 2003. Accessed 25/02/2016, available at http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html